Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of the Hebrew Bible (review)

Jennings begins his book by rightly noting that both homophobic and gay-affirmative readers of the Bible tend to embrace a common assumption, namely, that the Bible is hostile to homoeroticism. This is an assumption that Jennings is intent on dismantling. He argues that an excessive preoccupation with a few “well-chewed scraps”—specifically, the prescriptions against male homoeroticism in Leviticus together with the story of Sodom—“has diverted attention from . . . a whole feast of homoerotic material in the Hebrew Bible” (x). Certain of the dishes that Jennings proceeds to set forth have themselves been frequently chewed over, most notably, the tale of David and Jonathan. Still, there is also much that is novel in these pages. For starters, Jennings triangulates the David-Jonathan relationship as a David-Jonathan-Saul affair, construing David’s relationship to Saul as also implicitly homoerotic and even sexual. More specifically, part 1 of the book argues for a recurrent relational paradigm in the David story that Jennings, inspired by David Halperin, dubs “heroes and their pals,” whereby seasoned warriors are regularly accompanied by younger or lower-status males to whom they are homosocially and homoerotically bonded. Furthermore, Jennings argues, YHWH’s relationship to certain of the males in the David saga, not least David himself, falls squarely within the parameters of this same homoerotic paradigm.

Part 2, which again sticks mainly with the David story, turns to YHWH’s relationship with prophets rather than warriors. Here Jennings conjures up a narrative world in which bands of male ecstatics exhibit a homoeroticism focused upon YHWH and possibly also upon each other. These ecstatics are possessed by YHWH’s “erotic potency,” argues Jennings, and he also finds hints in the narrative that older male prophets transfer this erotic potency to younger males, a process notably represented in the resurrection (or “[Res]Erection,” as Jennings styles it [99]) of dead boys attributed to both Elijah and Elisha, an awakening that he then contends is mirrored in YHWH’s nocturnal visit to the boy Samuel.

Part 3 begins with Jennings echoing a position frequently adopted in queer studies, namely, that the male-male relationships that he has been analyzing in the previous chapters do not entail the “feminization” of either partner. Turning to YHWH’s relationship to Israel in contrast, Jennings posits a “transgendering” of the male object of homoerotic desire, specifically, a decking out of the male Israel in metaphorical drag, and hence his “feminization.” What is true of Israel is also true of the character Joseph, on Jennings’s reading, who undergoes transgendering, indeed, “sissyfying,” at the hands of his father, Jacob/Israel.

Part 4 attempts to grapple with the issue of why a prescription against at least some forms of male homoeroticism should have arisen in Israel’s legal codes. It then turns to the rather different question of whether female same-sex relations feature anywhere in the Hebrew Bible and proceeds to argue that such relations are in evidence in the tale of Jephthah’s daughter—Jennings has a characteristically unique take on what the daughter is up to during the two months that she wanders with her female companions “bewailing her virginity”—as well as the tale of Ruth and Naomi. The final question addressed in part 4 (one that, however, has also been raised in earlier chapters) is that of the relationship of the homoeroticism of classical Greek literature to the homoeroticism Jennings finds simmering throughout the Hebrew Bible, and his answer is that the latter largely predates and thus anticipates the former.

The book’s epilogue recycles the book’s main title and explains it. According to Jennings’s reading, Jacob is the victim of a sexual assault at the river Jabbok, a victim of YHWH himself, and not only Jacob but also Moses before him (this is Jennings’s take on the enigmatic detail of Exodus 4:24–26 that God...